After a decade of promises, the final cabinet was switched on last week.
The green street cabinet at the top of Back Lane in Rennick is not much to look at: a metal box the size of a wardrobe, bolted to a concrete plinth beside the war memorial and already streaked with sheep wool. But when engineers switched it on last Thursday afternoon, it completed a project that residents of the hill villages above the Ardle valley had been promised, in one form or another, for more than ten years. Every property in the six villages covered by the scheme can now order a full-fibre connection.
The final phase connects around 1,400 homes and businesses in Rennick, Askew, High Cobb, Lantern Hill, Slaithwick and the scattered farms between them. Until now most relied on copper lines that delivered download speeds of two or three megabits per second on a good day, and considerably less when the weather turned. The new connections offer up to a gigabit, roughly three hundred times faster than what many households had before.
A decade of false starts
The hill villages were first included in a regional broadband plan in 2015, when a contractor was appointed to bring faster lines to the valley. That contract was later scaled back after costs rose, and the villages were moved to a second phase. The second phase was delayed by a dispute over funding, then by the pandemic, and then by a shortage of engineers. Residents formed a campaign group, Hills Online, which at one point delivered a petition of 3,000 signatures to the Assembly in a milk churn.
The breakthrough came two years ago, when the Assembly agreed to underwrite the remaining cost alongside a smaller network builder that specialises in rural areas. The final bill for the hill phase was about £6.2 million, or around £4,400 per property – several times the cost of connecting a home in Calder. Much of the expense came from digging trenches across moorland and laying cable along eleven miles of narrow lanes that cannot be closed for long without cutting off whole villages.
“There were times when we honestly thought we would be the last place in the country on copper,” said Gwen Ashworth, who chairs Hills Online and runs a holiday cottage business from Lantern Hill. “I have had guests check out early because they could not join a video call. I have filled in booking forms in the car park of the pub in Ardle because it was the only place with signal.”
What changes on the hill
For businesses, the difference is immediate. Ashworth said she had already taken bookings from remote workers who had previously ruled the area out. The farm shop at Askew plans to start an online ordering service before Christmas, and the primary school at High Cobb, which has 34 pupils, will no longer have to download teaching videos overnight. The village hall in Rennick intends to run digital skills sessions for older residents in the new year.
Health services also expect to benefit. The GP surgery that covers the hill villages has struggled to offer video consultations, and the district nurses who visit patients at home have relied on paper notes because their tablets could not sync. Better connections should also allow more older people to use monitoring alarms and remote care equipment that depend on a stable line.
Take-up will be the next test. Connection to the network is free, but households must sign up with a provider and pay a monthly fee, typically between £25 and £45. Engineers say about a third of eligible homes in the earlier phases signed up within the first year. Ashworth’s group plans to knock on doors to explain the options, particularly to older residents wary of switching.
Not quite everyone
A small number of properties remain outside the scheme. Around thirty isolated farms and cottages on the far side of Harrow Moor were judged too expensive to reach by cable and will be offered vouchers towards satellite or fixed wireless connections instead. Callum Drysdale, who farms sheep above Slaithwick, said he was pleased for his neighbours but frustrated to be left out once again. “I can see the cabinet from my kitchen window,” he said. “It is just on the wrong side of a river.”
The network builder said it would review the remaining properties next year. For most of the hill villages, though, the long wait is over. On Thursday evening, a few hours after the switch-on, the Rennick community page posted its first message sent over the new line: a photograph of the cabinet, captioned “Finally.”
